Reluctantly Surrounded By Politics E-Book

D. C. Katsonga

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 570

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Despite growing up under the brutal dictatorship which Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda imposed on Malawi from 1964 to 1993, Davies Chester Katsonga didn't care much about politics. He was busy taking part in the escapades of youth – some funny, some thrilling, some serious. Such youthful exploits may be considered shocking or even outrageous in today's modern world. It was a different world back then. In this colourful biography, D. C. Katsonga offers a glimpse into the life of a young man who must navigate his sexual awakening against a backdrop of cultural taboos and political peril, experiencing the joys and troubles of love, lust, and curiosity while dodging the landmines of oppression and fear. This very personal and often gently comical story is a blend of sadness, humour, and wonder.

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ISBN print edition: 978-3-99146-492-1

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99146-493-8

Editor: Charlotte Middleton

Cover photo & internal illustrations: D. C. Katsonga

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my wife, Jayne, and our two sons, Luso and Phiri.

You inspire me.

To Mr Ken Andrew Nicholson for saving my life.

Personal rights must be respected in biographical texts. Therefore, don’t mention someone’s name unless you have their permission to do so (preferably in writing). It should also not be possible to draw direct conclusions about the person (e.g. by describing family relationships or giving their address). If you do not have such permission, it is in your own interest to change the names and, if necessary, the circumstances so that, in the worst case, no legal action can be taken against you as the author.

The short stories in this book are based on my real-life experiences and are recounted as accurately as I remember them. I have addressed the concerns you mentioned. However, I have changed the names of some individuals, including those who have passed away, to respect their privacy and for the reasons you highlighted.

WE ARE MADE TO BE

The journey through life is always perilous, and there is generally no expertise on how to move forward from one day to the next, from one year to the next.

To those who last the distance, don’t boast. You have made it this far and achieved this because your life path was pre-determined by a power greater than anything you have encountered in your life.

How often have certain accident moments missed you? How often have you missed a flight that crashed later? How often have you not married a partner who later turns out to be a killer? Survived a shipwreck and you did not even know how to swim? The only survivor of a horrific road accident? How often have I avoided snake bites while digging for mice in Mwanza?

We are here because we were meant to be here, doing something which was also pre-determined.

An illiterate sports personality makes millions and owns an aircraft, yachts, etcetera, while somewhere a university graduate is languishing in poverty! Fate! Pre-destiny!

How often have you met a former classmate who is now a brain surgeon or a NASA scientist and yet, in class, you and others thought their life would come to nought? Individuals who were stars in class have underachieved in their later lives. What is life all about, I ask. Does the answer matter? Perhaps not.

Where I hail from, it is taught right from birth that the way to success in adult life is through a good education. While in the developed world the situation is varied and as they say, nature is abstract, to find meaning in it one needs to accept that in nature, there is no chaos. This is why it is believed that everything in life is linked to everything else.

‘Believe that we are, not because we have chosen to be, but because we were meant to be.’

Chapter 1

JOURNEY TO MUTARE

As the tropical summer mid-afternoon sun did its worst, I decided to stop and cool myself with a soft drink at a roadside cafe. I had just passed a road sign which read ‘WELCOME TO MARONDERA’ and, apart from feeling a little dehydrated, my six-foot fourteen-stone frame needed stretching.

The driver’s seat in the brown twelve-year-old Peugeot 504 was in an advanced state of dilapidation. Due to wear and tear, the leather upholstery covering the seats was light brown and black, and there were more traces of the original shade of brown on the passenger’s seats than on the driver’s. Likewise, the springs on the left side of the driver’s seat had completely relinquished their responsibilities, and the owner, a close friend of mine, had advised me that to have a comfortable drive, I would need to sit on one buttock, the right one. He was the kind of chap who could be relied upon for helpful suggestions like that! As to the general state of the car, well, let me say I was quietly confident that I would be able to complete the three-hour drive from Harare to my destination, the small border town of Mutare, a town on the north-eastern border with Mozambique and back to Harare, a well over five-hundred-kilometre round-trip.

As I parked the car under a huge mango tree, which danced with the odd rhythm of a drunken Ngoma dancer at a ‘welcome’ party, a gentle fruity breeze, the most agreeable present from the spirits, one might say, wafted by.

Marondera seemed to be a popular country oasis for drivers in transit. There were several cars and a few trucks parked at the far end of the row of shop fronts. Standing or squatting next to the mango tree were vendors, mostly young women, selling, among other things, all manner of vegetables, wood carvings, and traditional clay pots.

My heart skipped a beat at the sight of a woman near a café door carrying a bamboo basket full of mushrooms of many varieties. She immediately reminded me of my mother, Mai naMlauzi. She knew all the edible mushrooms which grew in the bushes around our farm in Thondwe, and she used to tell us, ‘Davie, sight isn’t everything when it comes to mushrooms; they can be any colour. What you must look for is the ant test. Look at the mushrooms, and if ants are attacking them, they are not poisonous to human beings.’ We lived safely by this rule, and I now wondered if this woman had also used the ant test when she picked her mushrooms.

At the café, I bought myself a can of ice-cold Coca-Cola and a piece of soft smoke-cured wild-game meat. I was told it was buffalo and very tasty it was too. Inside and even on the veranda, all the seats were occupied, so I walked out into the car park and ate my snack leaning against my brown chariot. The temperature was considerably lower under the tree, and the ice-cold drink helped to cool me down by making me sweat a little before cooling me down. Naturally!

On the other side of the street, the little market was busy. Cars stopped by the roadside, their occupants picking what they wanted from the variety of goods on offer, quickly paying, and speeding away. I could imagine that prices were cheaper here than in the bigger towns, where most of the customers would be living. For a few minutes, I watched some children play hopscotch noisily at the far end of the car park, shouting and calling each other names for cheating. I saw myself in them and thought, how time flies.

Suddenly, my interest was distracted by an old, gaunt-looking man carrying two charcoal-grey medium-sized pots traditionally decorated with dark-brown triangles around the rim. They looked beautiful. He addressed me in the local language, Shona, which I was not very good at, which he soon grasped, judging by how I responded and quickly changed to English. ‘Pots, Bwana, clay pots, very cheap. Only three dollars each,’ he exhorted as he proudly handed me one for a closer appreciation and hopefully a sale!

His bushy white beard had a light-brown nicotine stain, which, I am sure, had been left by years of smoking, just above and below his mouth, and I noticed that when he smiled, his teeth, the ones he still had, were also tobacco-stained dark tan.

I can truthfully say that I did not want to buy pots. I did not need pots, and I was just about to return the pot I was holding when he began to cough violently. His fragile body looked as if it were going to fall apart under the intensity of the coughing fit. Still, after about a minute it relented, and he swallowed hard and seemed temporarily to have recovered. I do not know what he saw in the direction where the children were playing, but at that moment he started to laugh, slowly at first and then hysterically. Tears poured from his sallow, dark eyes and like narrow, flowing streams, disappeared into his bushy beard. Turning back to me, still smiling broadly, he continued with his sales pitch. ‘Are you taking both, then? They are locally made – our cottage industry, as they say, in Harare. The wife will certainly be good to you tonight. Women just love pots.’ He did not know all my defences were already down the moment I saw him cough; this was overkill.

I quickly paid him the asking price of six Zimbabwe dollars, plus two extra dollars for the effort, anxious to escape before the salespersons launched another attack on me. ‘Thank you, Bwana,’ he said, pocketing the money gleefully. ‘These are the last ones I am selling today. The money doesn’t last, though. I’m like a productive mango tree. As soon as there is a ripe one, someone plucks it. It’s the wife, you know. She never lets me near her if I fail to sell at least two pots a day. Sometimes she even refuses to cook for me. She is Manyika, from Honde Valley in Mutare. Difficult women, if you ask me, but then, if I had not married her, I would probably have married someone exactly like her. It’s fate, I suppose,’ he concluded philosophically. I could only smile compassionately.

As I pulled away, I noticed the old man had lit another cigarette and gone into another coughing fit. I wondered whether I should have used the extra two dollars to buy him a cough mixture, but then again, perhaps the Manyika wife had everything under control.

I had also expected a road sign showing which direction Marondera Prison was located. My father and other nationalists, fighting against the imposed Federation of Rhodesia and NyasAaron d in 1960, had spent some months there. Perhaps I may have to make a special trip to visit this eerie structure and connect with the macabre stories of torture Father had narrated to us after his release. I am not sure the other seventy-two detainees incarcerated at various detention centres fared any better.

Between Marondera and the next town of Rusape, there were many tobacco and maize farms along the road, with the occasional barn silhouetted against the vast canvas of a cloudless sky. Now and again, I could see herds of cattle grazing lazily, fertilising the land with their waste as they did so. It was a sight which reminded me of the late Frankie Howard, a British comedian, who once said, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, for it’s the other end that feeds the rhubarb.’

I did not stop at Rusape, but judging from the buildings I saw from the car, the town seemed larger than Marondera. Before long I reached the lower slopes of the eastern highlands on which Mutare is situated, and from then on the journey would be uphill.

When I had been driving for less than an hour, I needed to rest my right buttock and relieve the pressure on my bladder. Pulling into a deserted lay-by where the only signs of human life were empty cigarette packets and Coca-Cola and beer bottle tops, there was also a little hut with a large window, on top of which were the words ‘KUMBIRAI NO.1 TEA ROOM. OPEN 24 HRS A DAY’. It was closed! As I took a few steps into the bush, the sun was still up but far off and weak, as though being forced out of the sky at the end of the day against its will. Standing in front of a huge Masuku tree, I took in my surroundings. A rainbow carpet of wildflowers spread itself towards the nearby hills to my right. Red-chested mpheta, the yellow-winged pumbwa, maphingo, African starlings, and other birds sang above and around me. Wild fowls raised a cry in the bushes to my left as they flew and disappeared over the ridge. I felt a great sense of tranquillity. I was at peace with myself, at one with nature, and lost in my world.

I was brought back to earth by the sound of a huge over-loaded lorry which made such a commotion as it struggled uphill, leaving behind a trail of dark diesel clouds, that one would have been excused for thinking that an old steam locomotive was approaching. Awakened from my reverie as the birds contemptuously took flight, I jumped back into the Peugeot 504, into my favourite position in response to the state of wear of the driver’s seat. It was time to continue my way.

The going was slower now. The road had become very winding and steep, and the car could not be encouraged to go any faster. Now sulking as it slipped out of sight behind the many layers of hills and mountains, the sun had turned the blank sky to a pale, murky, and sombre blue extending to a pale yellow and finally, a bright orange as it was approaching the western horizon in the distance. The fact that there would be stars any minute now, millions of them, taking their places in the night sky, did seem to make quite a difference to the way the sun slowly moved out of sight.

I had been driving for over an hour when I finally saw a road sign which readCHRISTMAS PASS 5MLS. MUTARE 8MLS’.

On reaching the top of Christmas Pass, arguably the highest point in Mutare, the road veered suddenly to the left, making a bow shape, and still rising. The town, now visible below, appeared as a collection of tiny lights, nestling in the natural bowl in which it sat at the foot of the surrounding hills.

The descent into the town itself was very hazardous and slow, due to the many bends which needed to be negotiated with care. Barely visible to the northeast, in the dying sky, were mountain ranges that seemed to go on forever. Somewhere there lay my homeland, my country, Malawi. A five-hour drive would put me among my people, those to whom I would not have to explain who I was. They knew me. They had known me since birth. They were people who would offer me food, water to drink, and a place to sleep without question. They were people who knew the source and meaning of my name in the land of my ancestors, Land of the Lake, where laughter comes easily, and the welcome is as golden as the rising sun.

Bringing the Peugeot to a halt in front of the Mutare Sun Hotel, which was situated on the left side of the road, I thankfully stretched my legs and reflected on the story which had first brought me to this place and had been told to me by my maternal uncle, whom I had met only once during my school holidays, some twenty years or so earlier.

Uncle Davison Filipo had spent around eight years working in a South African asbestos mine. Each time, he was contracted to work for three years. In the end, he would pack all that he had amassed and book a train ticket, destined for Blantyre, Malawi. The train always passed through Botswana and overnighted at a place called Francis Town, which he pronounced Forest Town. This town, he said, had the most beautiful women one could ever wish to see. As he waited for his connection, which was on the following day, he was drawn into conversation by one of these women. He may have used the phrase ‘picked up’,and he may even have given the impression that it was he who did the picking up, but now I know a thing or two about Botswana women, I somehow don’t doubt who did the picking up – this woman, whom he described as being so beautiful that she had a ‘beauty spot all over her body!’

The following morning, she lifted him and carried him on her back to the bathroom, which was about ten metres from the house, bathed him all over – she was thorough too! – and carried him back into the house the same way. After breakfast – a calabash of fresh milk, which was still warm from the cow’s udder, and a huge piece of roast beef – he decided to marry the woman. Who would not? Marriage-deserving women don’t come any better than this. After a few months, he had used all his money and most of his hard-earned goods, some of which were intended for his parents, brothers, and other members of the extended family in Malawi. Everything was gone. Now there was only one thing for him to do: go back to Johannesburg, back to the mines.

Three years passed, at the end of which he got as far as his beloved Feresi Town and met yet another woman with a beauty spot all over her body. So, he had apparently described her to his buddies. This time she was better behaved than the first, or so he thought, but he was wrong, and after a year, it was back to the mines yet again. Another three years passed and this time, on his way home, he knew he had to be strong. When the train stopped overnight in Francis Town, my previously weak uncle decided to sleep standing up at the station. Offers did come, but he resisted them all.

The following day, everything moved smoothly, and my uncle was in Harare by late evening. After a few hours of rest, the train continued its journey, arriving in Mutare just before midnight. One of his workmates was getting off there and since the train was overnighting in Mutare, the friend offered my uncle accommodation at his home, which wasn’t far from Central Mutare station.

As the family was celebrating the return of their son, my uncle’s eyes caught sight of someone, a young woman, who just happened to be his friend’s sister. Her eyes were also arrested by him. Yes, you have guessed it, he missed the train to Blantyre the following morning and set up home with his Mutare lass, encouraged by his friend. Once again, all his money was ‘lost’ there.

There were gold mines in Mutare, where my uncle could have sought work, but the pay was more attractive in Johannesburg, so he made yet another trip to South Africa. This time he worked for only one year before his employers, the same ones he had worked for previously, discovered he had cancer of the lungs. Rather than tell him the truth about his condition, they told him that one of his parents had died and that he had to go back home. At the same time, a letter was secretly sent to the recruitment office in Malawi, alerting them of the true state of my uncle’s health. He was sent by air directly to Malawi, and somehow his wife, my auntie, was not told of this turn of events. By then she had borne him a son, and he believed she loved him. Shortly before he died, he mentioned her name to my maternal grandmother, Mai aNakhoni, and that of her village in Mutare. As far as I knew, no one had made any attempt to contact the widow in Zimbabwe. This could have been because of the disappointment caused by my uncle marrying a foreigner, and worse still, a Zimbabwean. The belief was that Zimbabwean and South African women married for money and were lazy. To quote my grandmother, aNakhoni, ‘They spend all their time painting their nails and looking into a mirror to see if their faces have changed.’

I had first come to Mutare to meet my auntie and give her the news about her husband’s death and reassure her that he had not voluntarily deserted her. The sad truth is that my mission had not been a success. The whole village had been wiped out by the Smith government during the liberation struggle, and those who lived there now were all new inhabitants.

Never mind, I had thought, they are now reunited, and he would have told her everything himself and probably a lot more.

Leaving Mutare, I paused in the same hotel car park, resting my weary buttocks, and I asked an old man about the mountain ranges I could see in the distance. In answer to my questions, he could only say, ‘Yes, Malawi is beyond those mountains. It is very far from here; it takes us the whole day on a bus ride to get there.’ He could not have known that with those few words, he transformed the nature of my journey from a one-off search for a disowned lady to one of a regular pilgrimage. Somewhere behind those mountains, my parents, brothers, sister, and friends were going about their everyday chores, unaware of my whereabouts, my hopes, my dreams, and sometimes my despair. If only I were a bird. All that freedom of movement, no passport, and no fear of shadowy figures in the night, but for now, only my eyes could take me, a political outcast, to where I could not go myself – to Malawi, my home country, still under the tyrannical rule of the president for life, Dr Kamuzu Banda.

Chapter 2

FATHER AND MOTHER

My father was a no-nonsense character. An ex-politician and a very prominent businessman, anywhere he went, people either loved him, loathed him, or even feared him. As a man who had almost become a priest, Father commanded respect within the Roman Catholic Church from both blacks and whites. On most Sundays, he played the pipe organ at St Montfort Catholic Institute in Blantyre during Mass.

Although his job meant he knocked off very late at night, he never missed his early morning Sunday Mass, and all of us got used to going to church every Sunday.

I remember one day we arrived in church about two minutes after the Mass had started and found that the two chairs which Father had brought to the cathedral for his and Mother’s personal use were occupied by a white couple. There were, I must add, other chairs vacant, but my father chose not to take them. Instead, he insisted to the deacon that the couple be moved to the other seats. As the entire discussion with the deacon was carried out in Latin, the other party looked on somewhat bemused, but eventually the couple complied and my parents took to their pews, and we all peacefully paid attention to the prayers thereafter. This incident happened in around 1961, when such behaviour from the ‘natives’ was unheard of!

Father later told us, as he drove us home, that he knew the white couple personally. They worked at the African Lakes Corporation (Mandala), and they were very cruel to their workers. He told us that he was sure they were racist and that they had deliberately sat on those seats just to spite him and Mother. ‘That’s why I couldn’t take it! We are all created in God’s image, and we are also created equal. Boys, as you grow older and into the world, you should not allow anyone to treat you differently because of reasons known to themselves, whatever these reasons might be. Never allow that!’ he said assertively.

My father had dropped out of training for the priesthood at the age of thirty-two or thereabouts, by which time he was fluent in English, French, and Latin, . The reason he gave for failing to complete his training was ‘poor health’, but as I never saw my father ill in all my life, I found it hard to accept that poor health had been the reason for his change of heart. I prefer to think that he had probably found different ways of serving the Lord.

He also picked up Portuguese and Yawo later in his working life, in Mozambique and Eastern Malawi respectively, along the shores of Lake Malawi in Mangochi.

My father came to Mwanza from his home village of Ligowe, Traditional Authority Mlauli, with his parents, as a baby in around 1912.

His father had married an Ambo (part of the current Chewa) tribe woman with a Chibwe clan name. The history of the Ambo people is that they had trekked southwards from the Katanga area of the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo and Northern Zambia area to the Zambezi valley in search of less congested and better agricultural land and pastureland for their animals. Their settling in this area coincided with the arrival of the warlike Mputa’s Ngoni people, who were running away from Chaka Zulu’s reach after the latter had defeated them on the battlefield fought on the veld of the Durban-Natal area of South Africa.

It didn’t take long for the Ambo people to capitulate to these warriors, and they were soon assimilated into the Ngoni culture after several skirmishes, and quite a good number of them started to identify themselves as Ngonis. By the time Grandfather betrothed her, a generation or so later, Miss Chibwe was a complete Ngoni lass, otherwise his parents wouldn’t have sanctioned the marriage in those days.

Grandfather became a senior member of the church when the Roman Catholic Church opened its first mission in N’nenu. After a few years, as the church continued to expand with its missionary work, th Mission is N’nenu decided to open a new mission at Mwanza Boma, and they chose my grandfather to escort them on this trip. The journey was on foot and about thirty-five kilometres. Their first stop was Kanduku Village, where they were welcomed by Chief Chithundu, now Kanduku, in the early evening. After introducing themselves and what their intentions were, they were given food and water and a place to sleep until the following morning.

At sunrise, as they were getting ready to depart, Chief Chithundu offered them two men to accompany them on their search for a suitable place to set up their new mission. These two men were Mr Chitsotso and his young brother, Mr Mando. The former later became my maternal grandad.

A church was constructed in no time at all, and alongside it a primary school was also built. Grandfather Katsonga became a church elder and a primary school teacher at Saint Paul’s. Mr Chitsotso was his deputy in church activities.

Having appreciated the sunny, mild climate in Mwanza, the Italian missionaries decided to introduce citrus fruits from Italy. They brought in tangerines, oranges, and lemons. These seedlings were being shared between the N’nenu and Mwanza missions, and it was my grandad who was physically being sent to N’nenu to bring the Mwanza supplies.

In the almanac of Saint Paul’s church in Mwanza, this information is available, and it makes me proud and thankful to my grandfather that he played a major role in the economy and nutrition of the Mwanza district, because the area is now the biggest producer of these fruits in the whole country.

It was not surprising when, after he had written and passed his Standard Six examinations, my father decided to go to a seminary, Nankhunda Seminary in Zomba, to be exact. This decision, commendable as it was, was not welcomed by my grandfather, who felt that Standard Six was the highest level of education a NyasAaron d boy could attain before going into the job market. He refused to fund my father’s decision at Nankhunda. Since my father was so determined to go ahead, he approached his father’s cousin in Lisungwi, Mr Lembani. It was he who funded my father’s education at Nankhunda Seminary. My father used to reminisce about how tough life was then, spending three days on the road walking from Mwanza to Nankhunda, crossing terrain awash with wild man-eating animals and snakes and crossing crocodile-infested rivers on his way to and from school at the opening and closing dates of semesters.

Just to buttress the annoyance Father still had against Grandfather, whenever there was a tiff between them, Father always reminded his father, ‘It’s Uncle Lembani who helped me achieve a better and improved education when you completely refused …’ I do not recall Grandfather ever defending himself against this accusation.

After four or five years at Nankhunda Seminary, Father was sent to Kachebele Seminary to complete his studies and be ordained as a priest. Two months before ordination he decided to quit, as I have already said, due to poor health.

He later got a job as a French teacher at a seminary in Dodoma, Tanzania. He was there for two years, and he returned home to map his way forward.

I recall him giving me French tutorials at home during my vacations when I was in Form Two in secondary school. I didn’t know Father was fluent in French until this time. After going through my school report, he called me and said that he would be giving me extra lessons in French, because a sixty-five percent score wasn’t good enough. On day one, he came out to the veranda carrying an old, tattered French textbook, which he later informed me he had used in Tanganyika in his early years. It was hard following his approach, because a lot of improvements had been made to the teaching of French since his time. The textbook which was in use at the time, entitled Pierre et Seydou was like the equivalent of the modern-day French Made Simple. Although I found the exercise helpful and very interesting, the time my father chose to do it was, in my view, most inappropriate. My mates and I used to play football on a nearby field from four p.m. almost every day if it was not raining. Sadly, my father used to get up from his siesta at around the same time, have his cup of tea or coffee before returning to the night club for the late shift, and he lovingly chose those playtimes minutes for the French tutorials. Alas!

By now, Grandfather Katsonga and his deputy, Mr Chitsotso, had become close as workmates but also as family friends. It was this working together which cemented their friendship to a level where they agreed to encourage their children to enter into marriage. This is how my father met Mai Namlauzi, my mother. So, my father did not have to go through all those time-consuming and sometimes expensive rituals of courting. To some extent, he might have been happier to do the same for us when we were old enough to join the adults’ league, but by then he knew and accepted that time had moved on.

Soon after my parents married, Father sought work. He was undecided about what to do, as there were very few good jobs open to black Malawians at that time. He would have continued with teaching, but local salaries were worse than in Tanzania. His decision to start work as an office clerk in Mozambique was largely because the Portuguese colonialists paid better than their British counterparts in Malawi.

Father, with his new bride, was off to Mozambique. Their first destination was a place they called ‘Dona ana’, where Father found a job as an office clerk. The Portuguese found him unusually interesting because of the language skills he had, and the fact that he was a Roman Catholic, like most Portuguese people in this area, was an added advantage.

The employer was a very prosperous vegetable farmer, who also ran two restaurants in the area. From time to time, when Father found himself in the restaurant kitchen, he would watch the cooks work and ask questions, and when he got home, he would attempt to reproduce the dishes the cooks were creating in the restaurant kitchen.

Slowly, his cooking skills began to pick up and in no time at all he could, and did, stand in for one absent cook. He was a natural, one could say! By the time he moved to what he described as a ‘better job’ in Tete, where my sister, Naphiri, was born, his Portuguese was fluent. He later worked in hotels in Quelimane and Beira, also in Mozambique.

With all the catering experience he had gained in Mozambique, Father decided to start his own hospitality business. Research, of a sort, had convinced him that the best place to open a pub and restaurant was on the lakefront, something he might have picked in Beira. His chosen location was to be Mpondasi in Fort Johnston (Mangochi). One might say he chose well, as Mangochi is now the number one tourist resort in the country.

It must have been after a long day of swimming and basking on the golden sands at Mpondas’ beaches that my parents’ thoughts began to wander and, on one such day, I was conceived. Maybe they had fish for supper, for I enjoy seafood so much!

Growing up, I noticed from my brother and sister that, when Father called them, they responded, ‘Papa!’ and, when it was Mother calling, one responded, ‘We Mayi!’ I later discovered that ‘Papa’ meant ‘Father’ in Portuguese, another relic from his tour of duty in Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique. Why he didn’t wish us to respond to him in NyasAaron d’s official language, English, or in our own Ngoni language, I will never know. Perhaps this is proof that Portugal’s policy of) was effective! Assimilado - the term given by Portugal to their African subjects in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and probably elsewhere like Macau and Goa, from the 1910s to the 1960s, who had reached a level of ‘civilization’, according to Portuguese legal standards, which theoretically qualified them for full rights as Portuguese citizens. In practice, the system was not implemented in a way which would produce the intended result, that of ‘close union of races of different degrees of civilization that help and support each other loyally’. However, this notion of ‘close union’ was never fully attained. And as to, ‘WeMayi’, this was a term from adulterated Zulu word, ‘Umama’, meaning, ‘Of Mother’, a response which endearingly gave one’s mother complete ownership of the child she was calling.

There were several household rules we had to religiously follow. Every morning, as soon as father was up and at the breakfast table, we had to go and greet him in English. ‘Good morning, Father,’ we would say, kneeling on one knee, or if we found him standing up, we took a bow before greeting him. That was a true Ngoni (Zulu) value. In the evening, just before retiring to bed, the routine was the same – ‘Goodnight, Father.’

We were instructed never to eat and walk at the same time. That meant that coming from school, no matter how hungry we felt, if we were offered a snack by a friend, we could accept and keep it until we got home. Another rule was, ‘Do not accept food at anybody’s house.’ I recall Cousin Jessy was caught breaking this rule at the Njobvuyalemas, one of our neighbours, when we lived in Ndirande, Blantyre. When Father was informed of this disobedience that evening, he looked sternly at Cousin Jessy and asked, ‘So, we do not provide you with enough food to eat in this house?’ Cousin Jessy did not respond. She simply looked to the floor.

‘NaMlauzi, Chisozibele!’ We, at least I, did not understand that order and how it related to Cousin Jessy’s transgression. However, the situation became clearer at dinner-time when, apart from the everyday family meal, there was a basin full of nsima and two deep dishes, one of vegetables and the other of beef stew. ‘Jessy, that’s for you, and I want you to finish it, because you have demonstrated we are failing you on the food front!’

‘I am sorry, Uncle, I will not do it again,’ she promised before her sobs and sniffles began. Chisozibele was a name given to one of the big saucepans father had bought in Harare, then Salisbury – Sozibele! – the prefix ‘chi’ in Chichewa signifying large size. From Cousin Jessy’s experience, we all lived in fear of Chisozibele and made sure we simply did not accept food at anyone’s home, no matter how hungry one was or how appetising the food was – rules are rules!

My Mother, Mrs. Dalia Katsonga (Nee Dalia Filipo Chitsotso) from Kanduku Village, Senior Traditional Authority Kanduku, Mwanza District, Malawi.1962.

My father’s active involvement in politics was influenced by whenthe Federation was imposed on Rhodesia and NyasAaron d, and his racialist experiences in Portugal’s colonised Mozambique.

He became a leading member of the NyasAaron d African Congress, and late in 1955, to facilitate his political ambitions, the family moved to the largest town in the country, Blantyre. There my father opened a pub for imported drinks such as whisky, brandy, gin, etcetera. These were drinks which could only be sold by those with a special licence, a document which was normally only granted to whites. My father was the first black Malawian to be allowed to sell such drinks by the colonial government. Politically speaking, this had worked against him, because his opponents countered that he was favoured by the federal government, and it was partly the root of the ‘stooge’ label which stuck on him. It was simply not so. They ignored, or failed to understand, his Roman Catholic background and learning, where hatred and the carrying of grudges are seriously discouraged. There were times when he would stop the car and give someone a dressing down in the middle of the street for calling him a stooge as we drove by. He was simply trying to explain his position politically, which he thought the Malawi Congress Party was misrepresenting. This is how I slowly became aware, from the age of five, that my father was chastised by some sections of the population, although at that tender age I was unable to understand or appreciate the full facts behind their opposition to him.

On 6th July 1958, the Ngwazi returned home after about forty years of self-imposed exile. After addressing the tens of thousands of those who had come to welcome him, he was driven into Blantyre town by my father, John Chester Katsonga, in his black-and-white-roofed left-hand-drive Chevrolet,registration number BT6325,driven from Chileka to Blantyre for a closed meeting with his new political team. He was, from that day, to be our house guest in Chirimba for well over a month. I hope I will be forgiven for boasting that I was arguably the first toddler in Malawito wet the Ngwazi’s pants a few times during this period! Bless him!

It is documented that Dr Kamuzu Banda was a member of the Labour Party whilst in Britain, a left-of-centre party. On the other hand, my father was a conservative, right of centre!

In 1959, a state of emergency was declared, and leading political figures, including my father, were arrested. Awakened in the early hours of the morning by loud banging and shouting at the door and the flash of torch lights by the police, Chalela and I had watched, horror-struck, from our bedroom door as our father was dragged out of the house only half-dressed. His request to change from his pyjamas into something more decent was ignored and, shocked, we were ordered back to bed by our mother. It was soon after its internment that Dr Kamuzu Banda failed to interest my father in joining the Malawi Congress Party, and he thereafter formed his political party, which he named the Christian Liberal Party, with encouragement, among others, from Archbishop Theunissenen. Malawi had become a one-party state. I remember playing Hide-and-Seek in what remained of the Kwacha taxi when we moved to ‘Four Miles’ in Zomba in 1964. It was parked on one of the plots, rusting away and having some parts of it cannibalised by Mr. Silombera, who had his garage only a stone’s throw away across the road, a forgotten symbol of the country’s political dawn and history. Father had parked it about ten metres away from his bedroom.

My late Father, John Stanislas Chester Katsonga 1958. A businessman, politician, and a linguist [apart from two local languages, he spoke English, Portuguese, French and Latin]. He came from Ligowe Village, Traditional Authority Mlauli, N’nenu District, Malawi.

It was the first thing he saw either from his ain bedroom window or when he opened the door to go out. I wonder what went on in his mind at the sight of what was a relic of the country’s recent political history.

One afternoon, my brother, Chalela, and I came back from school to find the old car was no longer there. Mother told us it had been bought for spares by Mr Silombera across the road.

House rules were very traditional. As a Ngoni (or Nguni) parent, there were three things Father felt he had to instil in us: hard work, obedience, and loyalty to family and friends. As far back as I can remember, we were supposed to be up early enough to greet him before he left for work, even on those days when we wanted to have a lie-in. It was a must. We all had to develop alarm clocks in our heads to be up when he was up. Evenings were the same – we had to bid him goodnight. All this was second nature to us, indeed to any proud Ngoni family. It was expected that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. We only sat together with my father when there was no one visiting him. Otherwise, by tradition, we were only supposed to ‘chat’ with him when we were alone as a family and there were issues to be discussed or one of us had broken one or two of the house rules we lived by.

Naturally, there was punishment for breaking any of these rules, and often I was the culprit. I recall one Saturday in 1962 – it must have been Saturday, for we were neither going to school nor were we going to church – when Chalela woke Father with a report that I had beaten and bitten him on the forehead, which was sadly true. As he was delivering the report, I dressed up quickly and ran out of the house without anyone seeing me. Father came into the bedroom, cane in hand, and must have been disappointed not to find me, but when a search around the house proved fruitless, I am sure his anger slowly turned into parental concern. Sending the servants half a mile up the road to check at the home of a family friend proved no more successful and, as there was still no sign of me when they returned, they were asked to check in the nearby bushes. It was Chalela who found me, now helping with the search. I could see an element of concern and sorrow when our eyes locked onto each other’s. He pretended to continue with the search. He did not want to hand me over to Dad for the punishment I deserved. The time now was just before seven o’clock in the morning and, as Father was leaving for work, I could overhear him saying, ‘Tell this boy I am coming home for lunch. He will never learn!’ he concluded as he banged his car door shut. I listened to the fading sound of the car with great relief as it sped off towards Rangely Stadium. His last comment referred to an incident the day before when I had cut one of the new dining-chair cushions with a razor blade, which had resulted in a caning.

A few minutes after Father’s departure for work, Chalela called out, ‘Davie, you can come out now; he’s gone. Let’s play.’ Until this day, I did not know that despite our daily squabbles, my brother, Chalela, loved and cared about me as his kid brother. I must have been eight years of age. Our frequent squabbles reduced immensely from this day onwards.

What I found hard to understand about my father was that he did not think twice about caning us for small matters but if, on the other hand, the offence was serious, he did not even shout at us; he just spoke to us. Take, for example, the year I was supposed to be in Grade Three at the Catholic Institute in Blantyre but found myself back in Grade Two. For the entire previous school year, I had left home on time, but other than going to class, I had chosen to spend my time playing on the swings in Jubilee Park. My ever-loving brother kept my secret from Dad. This was at the time when Father was at a crossroads in his political career, so he never had time to check our school progress or homework.

The headmaster, Mr Chiphala, knew about my truancy, but for reasons known to himself, he did not tell my father. Perhaps he did not want me to face the wrath of Father’s well-known temper, or indeed his silence was to save his own skin. One Sunday, during that year of Sundays, after attending church service, I saw the headmaster approaching us as we walked into the car park. My little heart was almost in my mouth. I am sure the headmaster knew I was petrified, because he bent down and whispered to me that he was not going to report me.

He and my father had a short chat, mostly about the weather and how the school was performing. And I remember him saying as he left, ‘See you in school tomorrow, you two,’

Chalela and I both responded in unison, ‘Yes, Sir.’

I still did not go to school until the following school year, by which time things were cooling down politically as far as Father was concerned. I suspect he was not spending a lot of time on the political circuit at that time. Consequently, this availed him more of family issues than was the case earlier. Naturally, he wanted to know how we were getting on in school. Chalela was all right. He was intelligent. I was the problem. ‘No brains and lazy,’ he used to call me. As for Sister Naphiri, certainly there were no issues there – she was Father’s favourite and doing exceptionally well at Saint Mary’s Girls’ Catholic Boarding School in Zomba.

‘You’re in Standard Three, Davie. How is it going?’ Dad asked one Saturday evening after supper.

‘I’m in Standard Two, actually,’ I replied. I am certain my face went all white as I said this, not that anyone would have noticed.

‘Why?’

‘Well,’ I continued, ‘when we went to school, the headmaster showed me a queue I should join. I joined it and it led to Standard Two,’ I confidently explained.

‘And you didn’t ask why you were still in Standard Two? I’m going to school with you boys tomorrow. I don’t understand. You should be in Standard Three,’ said Father, angrily shaking his head.

On the following Monday, he quietly drove us to the Catholic Institute Primary School where, on arrival, we all got out of the car and Father led us to the headmaster’s office. I do not know how many deaths I died from the car park to that office. It was like death by a thousand cuts – simply unbearable and unable to extricate me from the problem I had foolishly created.

Without the usual niceties of a greeting, Father went straight to the main issue. ‘I would like to know why my son, Davie, is in Standard Two and not Standard Three, where he should be this school year.’

‘Ah! Sir, Davie missed all his examination papers, and he was never in class most of the time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I even recall the other day when we met in the church car park, and I asked you how the school was doing. Even then, it never occurred to you to give me this very important information, Mr Chiphala. Look, as far as I am concerned, my son is Standard Three! That is all there is to it! I’m sure you’ll make sure this is so,’ my father concluded firmly as he ushered us out of the office.

As Father left the schoolyard, Chalela and I proceeded to our respective classrooms. Within minutes, the headmaster walked in, whispered to the teacher, called my name and asked me to follow him. He was taking me to my new class, Standard Three. I was almost two weeks behind my new fellow pupils at this point.

The subject being taught as I took my seat was arithmetic. Standard Two consisted of H.T.U. (Hundreds, Tens, Units) and I was not good at it then as I sat down, looked at the blackboard and noticed to my horror that this time those letters had an extra ‘T’. It was now T.H.T.U. This was simply too much for me I have never liked the subject since. I did, however, pass my final exams that year, and I even remember the headmaster congratulating me for my hard work. What hard work? I wondered. This was in 1963. Chalela and I were then ferried to Zomba Catholic Boys’ Primary School. It seemed Father wanted to have a change of scene from politics, from the tinderbox of Blantyre. Although Zomba was the capital city of Malawi at the time, it was Blantyre where the real action was! Besides, the fact that his father and sisters were already in that town must have made his decision to move his business closer to them a little easier.

Of the three children, I stayed at home the longest, which gave me an unplanned opportunity to observe how my parents related to each other. Before this, I was quite aware of the love which existed between them. As a wife, my mother did as she was told, and her husband brought home the beef. The arrangement was something no one in my culture could fault. It was, in our cultural sense, simply perfect.

My mother’s contribution to the restaurant side of the family business was cooking and baking. I remember days when she was so tired but still felt she must continue her preparations. It was on days like these that I never went out to play. Although we had many servants, Father preferred my mother, his dear, hard-working wife, to prepare certain dishes. Often, I was there too, mincing, whipping eggs, cutting onions and tomatoes, etcetera. One afternoon, busy in the kitchen, my face crudely and accidentally dusted with flour, for it was on a windy day – I must have looked like a traditional Nyau dancer – from the corner of my eye I caught my mother standing still, her eyes looking at me with a degree of sadness, perhaps disappointment. ‘My son, how I wish you were a girl,’ she said ruefully as she continued with her work. Unsure of how to respond to these words, for I did not know exactly what she meant, I carried on working, thinking that perhaps I should involve myself in more ‘manly’ chores than cooking, but despite the confusion in my young mind I still enjoyed helping Mother in the kitchen.

At first, Father was happy with my input in the kitchen for the family business, until he noticed changes in my behaviour every time he had a tiff with my mother. At times, I did not think he was acting fairly and, being thirteen years old at the time, I did not know how to hide my facial expressions, which inadvertently graphically reflected my feelings. I was very protective and supportive of my mother. There was nothing wrong with their marriage per se, just little things that, in my view, were less than just to Mother.

Just to buttress the above point, on one trip to Mwanza to visit my maternal grandmother, my mother and father decided to be a little less conventional than usual and have a picnic on the way. Mother prepared two grilled Piri-piri chickens and some other items to tempt the palette, which were packed and loaded into the car ready for the journey. It was a very relaxed drive on what was a bumpy gravel road from Chileka to our destination and, soon after crossing the Shire River, my father spotted in the nearby bush to the left a big outcrop of a rock with a flattish top about twenty metres from the road. ‘That’s a nice spot for a picnic, wouldn’t you say, Nam?’ he asked confidently, bringing the car to a halt. I am sure I speak for everyone, including my parents and my brother, as well as myself, when I say we were all looking forward to demolishing those two chickens.

A big mat was laid on the rock, all the food was set out and hands washed, and Father had already blessed the food when he, turning to Mother, inquired, ‘Where’s my Piri-piri powder?’ He never ate his food without Piri-piri.

‘I think I forgot to pack it,’ replied my mother resignedly. ‘But there’s already enough of it on the chicken. Look, the chicken is looking red because of it!’ Mother tried to explain.

‘Over twenty years of marriage, and you still don’t know what your husband likes,’ fumed my father. ‘Come on, pack everything. We will eat at your mother’s.’ This was the end of the beginning of our picnic.

After Malawi had been given self-government in 1963, Father had to reflect on events which preceded this momentous event. In 1962, his deputy in the Christian Liberal Party, Ponde-ponde, was murdered by supporters of the Malawi Congress Party. This was the first reported political murder in Malawi, and from then on, Father had to have bodyguards wherever he went. Life had become increasingly dangerous for the whole family, and he felt he had no other choice but to leave politics altogether rather than do the unthinkable and join the Malawi Congress Party, a move he had always vowed he would never make. Being involved in politics for my father was a duty he felt he owed his people, quite apart from his other interests in his professional life, but from then on he concentrated his energy on his business, and when life in Blantyre became unbearable for him, even after quitting politics, he sold everything and settled in Zomba in 1963, as I have already said earlier.

Father was a very active man. He successfully ran a nightclub in Zomba between 1964 and 1968 before moving to Lilongwe, where he built another nightclub at the new (now old) airport, which became the best and busiest nightclub in the city and the entire central region in Malawi at the time – not my words but results from tourism inspectors!

Father left the Zomba joint to my elder brother, Chalela, and concentrated on the new investment in Lilongwe. After a few years there, he won a tender to run the Airport Caterer’s Cafeteria, which was shortly followed by another victory, another tender to build a motel, which was part of the Capital City Development Corporation. Our capital city was being moved from Zomba to Lilongwe, and the main sponsors, Canada and South Africa, wanted a Malawian to run this establishment, which opened in 1977 and was called Chester’s City Motel (now the Lingadzi Inn).

Looking back now, the transition from politician and businessman to just a businessman was a very hard road for my father. He had gradually become calmer and a lot more relaxed. Despite his quitting politics, at mass rallies, President Dr. Ngwazi Hastings Kamuzu Banda did not stop taking a dig at him every so often. There were those people the president did not seem to like much, and many of them ended up in mysterious ‘accidents’ or detention but, for some reason, Dr Kamuzu Banda spared my father from such extreme extra-judicial punishments. Maybe he decided he would get more satisfaction from slowly and continuously tormenting him at his political rallies, thus inflicting death by a thousand cuts, or perhaps he was still thankful for my mother’s home cooking during the early months of his return from exile! I am sure Dr Kamuzu Banda’s intelligence (loosely speaking) people advised him that they had no evidence my father was scheming against him, yet the uncalled-for oral attacks continued unabated.

One incident, which happened in broad daylight in 1969, served as a reminder to my father that his political enemies had not forgotten him. Driving from Lilongwe to Zomba, my mother by his side, he was halfway up a very steep hill, then called Kasupe, when he came upon two Caterpillar Gladers apparently engaged in some road repair work. They signalled him to pass, but as he did so they both set off in motion, forcing his car towards the edge of the escarpment and the approximately one-hundred-and-fifty-metre drop below. It took all of Father’s driving skills and an element of luck to avoid escaping this attempt on his life. Reaching the local town at the top of the mountain within two minutes, Father insisted on walking back and confronting the Caterpillar Gladers’ operators, but Mother stood firm and suggested he report the matter to the police station only a few metres away. He relented, and a statement was made at the police station, after which two police officers wanted to be taken to the spot where the incident was reported to have taken place.

Once there they did see the tyre marks of the Caterpillar Gladers, which were visible and fresh and so were the tyre marks of my father’s car, but there was no sign of the Gladers themselves nor of anyone working on that stretch of the road, as my father had reported. The police promised to investigate the matter, and that was the last he heard from Kasupe Police.

Up to the final days of his business life, Father had a loyal bodyguard called Peter, who came from Domasi in the Zomba District. Among other things, my father liked Peter because of his loyalty and physical presence. He also had a good sense of humour, which at times could be dark. I recall one afternoon when we were in Lilongwe, when Father remembered that one of his old friends was in the hospital at Likuni. Flowers, a card, and foodstuffs were purchased, and we were soon on our way to Likuni General Hospital. When we arrived, there was a doctor and a nurse at the man’s bedside, so we were asked to wait along the corridor just outside the ward. It was very busy, with people walking up and down, and a few doors along the corridor Peter saw an old man in a wheelchair, looking rather helpless, his head hanging sideways over his right shoulder and his arms dangling weakly by his sides. He was also completely bald. We then noticed there was a tube which, although we could not see where it came from on his body, appeared to be entering an orifice in the man’s neck.

‘What’s that?’ Peter asked my father, pointing at the tube.

‘It’s a feeding tube,’ Father explained in a low voice, ‘for food in liquid form, like tea,’ he concluded.

‘How about sugar?’ queried Peter, a wry smile on his face. ‘Er … er … er … how does he know if they’ve put enough sugar in it?’

‘I don’t think in his condition that is an issue he is bothered about, Peter!’ retorted Father.

I always wondered why Peter had no wife for all the time he was with us. Then one day, after washing Dad’s car, he excused himself to go off for a few minutes to have his breakfast while Father was having his.

‘So, you will have to prepare it yourself, Mister? Perhaps you should get yourself a wife! Why don’t you have a wife?’

‘I did until one year ago, but she passed away. We had two daughters together, both of whom are now married.’

‘Do you see them? I mean, do you visit them sometimes?’

‘I could, if only I knew where they were,’ he responded with a somewhat dejected tone.

My father died on the 12th of March 1986 in Zomba, a time when one mysterious heavenly body was visiting planet earth. It was a comet, which even Aristotle conceded ignorance about in Meteorologica. Aristotle thought the comet was a body with clefts which held some inflammable gases which keep on igniting as they escaped, hence the brightness of the comet. He later admitted he did not know much about this heavenly body and yielded to what science was finding out at that time.

In 1066, Halley’s Comet appeared, and it was blamed for bringing bad luck to the Normans, who were vanquished at the battle